Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis

Front Matter......Page 2
Title Page......Page 6
Copyright Page......Page 7
Dedication Page......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Contents......Page 12
Preface......Page 14
The Modern Context......Page 18
Defenses of the Imagination......Page 20
Portraits......Page 40
Osip Mandelstam: The Poet as Witness......Page 42
Walter Benjamin: The Aura of the Past......Page 64
Gershom Scholem: History and the Abyss......Page 84
Lea Goldberg: Poetry in Dark Times......Page 108
Uri Zvi Greenberg: A Poet of the Holocaust......Page 120
Charles Reznikoff: Between Present and Past......Page 136
Eliot, Lawrence, and the Jews: Two Versions of Europe......Page 154
Fiction and Historical Crisis......Page 170
Jewish Humor and the Domestication of Myth......Page 172
A Novel of the Post-Tragic World......Page 186
Agmon’s Mediterranean Fable......Page 204
Shtetl and Revolution......Page 216
Fiction in a State of Siege......Page 230
Updike, Malamud, and the Fire This Time......Page 250
A Problem of Horizons......Page 266